Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education

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Thomas A. Regelski, Editor

Wayne Bowman, Associate Editor
Darryl A. Coan, Publishing Editor

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Electronic Article

DeNora, T. (2002). The Everyday as Extraordinary: Response from Tia DeNora Action,
Criticism, and Theory for Music Education. Vol. 1, #2 (December 2002).

Tia DeNora, 2002 All rights reserved.

The content of this article is the sole responsibility of the author. The ACT Journal, the MayDay Group,
and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville are not liable for any legal actions which may arise involving
the article's content, including but not limited to, copyright infringement.

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Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education Electronic Article

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The Everyday as Extraordinary

Response from Tia DeNora
University of Exeter

As Daniel Cavicchi puts it in the opening to his review of Music in Everyday Life
(MiEDL), "It has always struck me as slightly absurd to have to talk specifically about
something called 'music in everyday life'." His point underscores an intriguing irony in
writing a book like this one: [F]or me and for millions of other people in the Western
world, Cavicchi reminds us, music is experienced only in everyday life. . . . Like many
adults, I music when I can, within the constraints of the culture in which I live."
Most Americans, notes Cavicchi, don't play music, they listen and dance to music.
And indeed, as he aptly observes, CD player sales overwhelmingly outnumber instrument
sales. These observations ring true in the United Kingdom as well. Lucy Green's recent
(2000) study, How Popular Musicians Learn, also emphasises ways the institutional
organisation of music education misses much of what is important about musical activity.
The musical education system, she argues, with its vocational emphases upon musical
performance and formal technical skill, aesthetic education, and canonical learning, serves as
a contrast structure against which most students most of the population in the
industrialised West, for that matter emerge as musically deficient. But are these portrayals
(mine, Cavicchis, Greens) reasonable likenesses to what individuals actually do, musically
speaking? As Hildegard Froehlich notes, [t]he challenge now lies in gathering data that
either confirm or reject this hypothesis.
There are echoes in this question of an older concern about so-called "deviant
subcultures" a theme John Shepherd invokes through his discussion of subcultural
theory. 1970s writers on subculture urged the need for ethnography in order to illuminate

DeNora, T. (2002). The Everyday as Extraordinary: Response from Tia DeNora. Action, Criticism, and
Theory for Music Education. Vol. 1, #2 (December 2002).
http://mas.siue.edu/ACT/v1/DeNoraResponse02.pdf

Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education Electronic Article

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both (a) the essentially orderly activities conducted by 'outsiders' and (b) the situated role
played, in these activities, by popular cultural forms and their consumption. These scholars
helped show the short-sightedness of simply presuming a culture's function within
particular social circumstances: culture simply could not be read from top-down. There was,
that being the case, no shortcut around ethnography. As Shepherd puts it, this "new wave"
of popular music scholars (circa late 1970s) saw within popular music "the possibility of
understanding music not as a pristine artistic form unsullied by the gray forces of mass
social process such sullying producing popular music but as a cultural form that was
socially constituted." What subcultural theory bequeathed to socio-musical study, then, was
an ecumenical approach to musical genre, and a realisation that conventional musicology's
"toolbox" (to use Don Randel's [1992] term) precluded too many valuable topics. In seizing
disciplinary control over the study of music, Susan McClary (quoted by Shepherd)
charged, musicology "prohibited the asking of even the most fundamental questions
concerning meaning...something terribly important [was] being hidden away by the
profession."
One of the first adjustments to the socio-musical paradigm, then, is a shift advanced
in MiEDL and by all three reviewers here as well toward socially situated "musicking"
where ever it is to be found. This means a shift away from the focus on musical texts and
scores; a shift toward musicking as situated practice. The reviewers are quite right to
suggest that MiEDL is not the first to make this point (and the various works cited by the
three reviewers merely scratch the surface of the excellent forerunners and contemporaries
of MiEDL). One of the great pleasures of engaging others in a forum like this is learning
about new work that constitutes the wider community of scholarship. What seems clear at
this stage is that the points of convergence have multiplied in recent years; that
"mainstream" musicology is also responding to developments outside it; and that as
indicated by this symposium a basis has been established for interdisciplinary work in
DeNora, T. (2002). The Everyday as Extraordinary: Response from Tia DeNora. Action, Criticism, and
Theory for Music Education. Vol. 1, #2 (December 2002).
http://mas.siue.edu/ACT/v1/DeNoraResponse02.pdf

Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education Electronic Article

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future. It is that basis, as fleshed out here by these three reviewers, to which I would like to
direct my attention in the remainder of this response.
The first of these points of convergence is methodological/theoretical. Although I
expected it of him, I was gratified to find John Shepherd advancing the view that to divorce
fieldwork from theory impoverishes socio-musical study. Shepherds work serves, in itself,
as a benchmark for commitment to this dual practice. I was also greatly pleased to see in his
discussion of my work a clear restatement of the need to chart a course between the notion,
on the one hand, that "the music itself" is the author of music's effects (which would be
linked to a paradigm consisting solely of interpretive analyses of musical texts not so far
removed from earlier formalisms in its elision of what real people really do with music), and,
on the other hand, the idea that music's effects derive from nothing more than what people
say about music and its powers. As Froehlich observes, the former position fails to
transcend the musicologist's own relationship with the musical text. And as Shepherd
observes (a point his work has long stressed), music has a materiality that invariably extends
beyond matters musicological. Indeed, this is a key point in MiEDL: we need to focus on
human-music interaction, by which I meant the process by which music's properties come
to be drawn into, and to structure the very ways we then "respond to" music. This reflexive
to-and-fro of musical material and interpretive (cognitive, embodied) response results in
something that is never one-directional, and always more than the sum of its parts. It is only,
I believe, by taking such a paradigm seriously that we can, ultimately, take music seriously
as a material of social structuring.
This programme calls for a symmetrical analytical approach attending both to
musical materials and to the circumstances in which these materials are heard and integrated
into social experience in real time. By definition such an approach is interdisciplinary. If
anything, it pushes music scholarship and sociological analyses to a yet more micro
level, focusing upon music as, in Cavicchis phrase, "an open 'process'" which I take to
DeNora, T. (2002). The Everyday as Extraordinary: Response from Tia DeNora. Action, Criticism, and
Theory for Music Education. Vol. 1, #2 (December 2002).
http://mas.siue.edu/ACT/v1/DeNoraResponse02.pdf

Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education Electronic Article

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mean the way units of musical material come to be relevant to social experience. A chord or
a rhythmic or melodic gesture, for example, may provide a trigger for (a means of enlisting
an actor in) an entirely different train of affective and/or embodied action. Consider the
hypothetical example of how our beings/bodies "turn" when the music on the jukebox
changes. While the directions of turning may vary, what is significant here is the idea of
musically instigated (or, perhaps, musically warranted?) re-orientation. To speak of
issues such as these is to speak of what music may be seen, in situated social settings, to
afford. And, as Froehlich aptly observes, anyone concerned with music schooling ought to
be concerned with how, in and through in-school music education, mind and body are
conjoined on a daily basis (and often routinely repeated) actions that may well comprise a
very deep, and otherwise tacit, aspect of the music curriculum.
I have already, in this response, begun to shift attention to ways these three reviews
presage potentially useful applications for the music-in-everyday-life programme. The
concern of how to further specify just how music comes to be linked to embodiment and
feeling form is discussed as well by Shepherd. Here there is considerable work still to be
done, work that would profit from continued interaction not only with ethnomusicologists
and popular music scholars, but also with social psychologists of music, biologists, and
others (cf. Juslin and Sloboda 2001). Shepherd suggests a way forward, through the notion
I have advanced of music as "prosthetic technology." As Shepherd writes, "...the material
through which music is recognized as music is sound, and a particular, non-denotative use
of sound at that. This is surely the technology to which DeNora refers." He continues,
suggesting that we might examine how music enters the body and is experienced inside the
body in ways other cultural forms are not (consider here the extreme examples of infra and
ultra sound). In short, future work could profit from further consideration of music's
intention, not just extension, of the body, and there are models here in Shepherd and
Wicke's discussion of music and the body (1997).
DeNora, T. (2002). The Everyday as Extraordinary: Response from Tia DeNora. Action, Criticism, and
Theory for Music Education. Vol. 1, #2 (December 2002).
http://mas.siue.edu/ACT/v1/DeNoraResponse02.pdf

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Equally important I think is Shepherd's notion of a performative model of music's

power a model focused on music as it enrols, enlists and transforms its users. He is quite
right that such an understanding of music's social power aligns it with adjacent projects in
Science and Technology Studies and their concern with artefacts and user-configuration
issues. (The STS area has recently "discovered" music as a major area for attention
witness a Symposium at Maastricht in November 2002, called Sound Matters.) This theme
could, I believe, profitably be made more explicit within socio-music studies, particularly as
we move away from what Shepherd calls "a shopping list of meanings". We are now a long
way from any conception of music listening as passive. We are well-removed also from a
focus on reception as concerned primarily with interpretation and meaning. Our focus is,
rather, the ways music gets into (helps perform) social life.
Within this focus, further issues seem clearly demarcated for scrutiny in the near and
middle future. Perhaps most notable among these is a concern, raised by all three reviewers,
with music's implications for social relations and, more boldly, for power relations. As
Froehlich observes, "[w]hat we play or to what we listen either asserts or questions the
power relationships in which we find ourselves, creates associations of belonging or notbelonging, and leads to or takes away from feelings of alienation or affirmation." Cavicchi
develops this point through the concept of entrainment. He does so in a way that conjoins
musicology (by which here I mean to focus on musical materials pace the discussion
above about whether musical affect is arbitrary or immanent) with ethnomusicology,
sociology and social psychology. He explicitly focuses on musical-environmental matters,
asking "how exactly different bodies are synchronized with different environments," so as
to think about "musical situations in which the body can't or won't be synchronized." This
point leads back naturally, I think, to the classroom, a fitting social setting with which to end
this response, and to a vision of what music might, in Cavicchis words, "do for different
people." To construct such a vision would, I suspect, arouse musical consciousness (and
DeNora, T. (2002). The Everyday as Extraordinary: Response from Tia DeNora. Action, Criticism, and
Theory for Music Education. Vol. 1, #2 (December 2002).
http://mas.siue.edu/ACT/v1/DeNoraResponse02.pdf

Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education Electronic Article

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thus social consciousness) in ways that would foster critical awareness of music's enabling
(and disabling) role in the lives of music pupils. In so doing, it would also foster a more
explicit awareness of what music may "make possible" (or impossible), thus fostering a
more critical recognition of musics potency in every day life.

DeNora, T. (2002). The Everyday as Extraordinary: Response from Tia DeNora. Action, Criticism, and
Theory for Music Education. Vol. 1, #2 (December 2002).
http://mas.siue.edu/ACT/v1/DeNoraResponse02.pdf

Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education Electronic Article

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References
Green, Lucy. 2001. How Popular Musicians Learn. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Juslin, P. and J. Sloboda. 2001. Music and the Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Randel, Don 1992. 'The Canon in the Musicological Toolbox'. In K. Bergeron and P.
Bohlman, eds. Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons, 10-23. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

DeNora, T. (2002). The Everyday as Extraordinary: Response from Tia DeNora. Action, Criticism, and
Theory for Music Education. Vol. 1, #2 (December 2002).
http://mas.siue.edu/ACT/v1/DeNoraResponse02.pdf

Editorial Policies and Practices

Topics and Disciplines: ACT solicits studies dealing with critical, analytical, practical,
theoretical and policy development topics that are connected to applying, challenging or
building on the issues and topics germane to the Action Ideals of the MayDay Group (see
www.maydaygroup.org). Those Ideals propose areas and strategies for broadly needed
change in music education, and embrace a wide range of related topics, content, questions
and issues requiring focused study. The Ideals should be understood, then, as working
hypotheses rather than doctrines or foregone conclusions. Therefore the focus of this
journal is devoted to these seven distinct but interacting domains rather than to other
topics. Scholarship from diverse disciplinary perspectives is invited and welcomed:
education, music, philosophy, sociology, history, psychology, curriculum studies, and
others as well. Submissions limited to highly specialized topics unconnected to the
broader interests of the Action Ideals are not encouraged.
Audience and scope: The MayDay Group is an international and non-national
organization. Submissions should, as much as possible, be framed in terms relevant and
understandable to music educators everywhere.
Language: English is the preferred language, although manuscripts in other languages
will be reviewed when reviewers are available who are competent in the language and
content of the paper. This allows theoretical and critical papers to benefit music
educators in places where such kinds of publication are, for one reason or another, not
available. Non-English submissions must be accompanied by an extended English
language abstract that will be published along with an accepted paper.
Style and format: Manuscripts must be sent electronically to the editor, Thomas A.
Regelski. The use of a standard style manual or particular formatting practice is not
required: The most important consideration is that format and style suit the particulars of
the research and promote the effectiveness of its presentation. However, reviewers may
find reason to stipulate certain changes to improve a paper. Authors are encouraged to
take advantage of electronic presentation formats. Preliminary consultation with
Publishing Editor Darryl Coan is encouraged prior to submission of a paper in order to
determine technical practicality and choices of options.
Timing of publication: Articles will be published as they are accepted through the
refereeing process and are technically ready for publication. ACT is not limited to a set
number of issues per year. As an e-journal it is well suited to facilitating continuing
debate and deliberation of key issues. This allows an extended series of responses
concerning a particular paper or topic and promotes building constructively upon themes
raised by earlier papers, thus advancing a particular topic or issue in a timely and
progressive manner.
Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education has features that are unique among
music education scholarly journals today.

Multi- and interdisciplinary content and methods are encouraged.

The format is flexibly effective for a wide variety of presentation formats, and
articles can be published in a timely manner.
Dialogue on and expansion of themes allow progressive development and
extensive exploration of topics.
The use of international experts as referees resists parochialism and insider
politics, thus promoting trust in both the integrity of the process and the results.

These features give promise of leading to a solid, relevant and useful multi- and
interdisciplinary research baseempirical, theoretical, and practical (viz., relevant action
and applied research)with the potential to refocus, revitalize and reconstruct the theory
and practices needed if music education is to respond productively to the challenges of
the modern world and to changes concerning schooling. Such research is needed to
counter the professional inertia and status quo thinking that prevents addressing
challenges and changes with new findings and ideas for improvement. We encourage
music educators everywhere to take full advantage of this new opportunity for addressing
the critical, theoretical and practical needs of music education.
Thomas A. Regelski, Editor.

______________________________________________
Complimentary announcement:

Journal of Historical Research

in Music Education
Volume

XXIII:2

April

Contents
Editorial
Jere T. Humphreys,

Arizona State University

Articles
Creative Music Making as Music Learning: Composition in
Music Education from an Australian Historical Perspective
Peter Dunbar-Hall,
Australia

University of Sydney, New South Wales,

2002

The Influence of Japanese Music Education in Taiwan during

the Japanese Protectorate
Angela Hao-Chun

Lee, Mulgrave, Victoria, Australia

A History of Music Education at Michigan State University

Jean H. Fickett,

Michigan State University

Some Notions, Stories, and Tales About Music and Education in

Society: The Coin's Other Side
Jere T. Humphreys,

Arizona State University

Book Reviews
Butt, John. Music Education and the Art of Performance in the
German Baroque
Reviewed by Brian Cardany, Arizona State University

Sudhalter, Richard. Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their

Contributions to Jazz, 1915-1945
Reviewed by Andrew Goodrich,

Arizona State University

Frederiksen, Brian. Arnold Jacobs: Song and Wind, ed. John Taylor
Reviewed by Christopher
University

M. Hulett and Barry N. Kraus, Arizona State

Contact:
JHRME
School of Music
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-0405
USA
jhrme@asu.edu
http://music.asu.edu/jhrme

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